One day you will meet a girl who talks about the world like she’s lived a thousand lives and still has the wonder of a child, you will realize she’s the type to fight until she’s bleeding underneath her fingernails as she clings to jagged rocks if it means casting light and raising her voice for those without one, she will bring a passion you’ve never seen and a feeling you’ve never known, she will look at you with giant green eyes that glow like planets in a big black void and you will feel your heart catch in your throat, you will feel every inch of you tense up and you will bite your tongue and you will want to run.

Don’t you fucking dare.

Don’t turn your head and don’t even move a muscle, stare at her even if she’s so bright it burns, reach for her even though you’re terrified if you touch her the wrong way you’ll rip a hole in her soul and she’ll bleed galaxies all over the both of you, kiss her so hard you can feel the stars burning at the back of her throat, trace the lines of her spine and memorize them like craters on the moon you always swore you came from
you’ve said before you’re sure you’re an alien,
now prove it.

She makes you tremble and that makes you mad, you hate to shake, you haven’t let yourself feel vulnerable for seven earthly rotations around the sun, that’s seven years, we get it, you’ve never been colder and you’re sure most of you is dead but your heart is still heaving so don’t be stupid, she’s standing right in front of you.

You are brilliant and you are intuitive and you are kinder than you’d like to admit but you are not a hero for disappearing before you could destroy her, you’re not doing anyone any favors by killing things before they can be brought to life and insisting you don’t know how to love, if you really believed she deserved the world you would reach inside yourself and build what you could from the universe within you, if it turned out it wasn’t enough you’d shake hands and move on with your separate solar rotations but you won’t even try, you won’t even open your eyes, and it begs the question, who do you think you are?

Do you really think you know what’s in the cards
before
the stars?

If you say you’re gonna ruin her then of course you will, self fulfilling prophecies are terrible things and you know you’re the king of them, but have you stopped to think that maybe she’s the queen?

Have you stopped to think that maybe she’s terrified too, she’s had to bolt her feet to the fucking floor because she had the curve of your jawline memorized the first time she touched it and it made her feel sick, she’s been told all her life she’s a hand grenade and she’s petrified you’ll pull the pin and be blown to bits, she’s beside herself in a volatile fit imagining all the ways both your hearts might break but she’s still in her spot in the milky way, she’s still in place in front of pluto peeking out at you on the moon, she was born from neptune and she’s bottomless and blue and you can see yourself falling into her like an endless pit and it makes you want to freeze and wither up because you’ve always said
you’ll die
alone
and you’ve lived like a diamond in the rough, until she showed up shining like a sapphire and it’s all
too
much.

But here is the thing: nobody asked you to promise your life, nobody asked you to patch up the holes in her soul, it’s not your job to make her whole and nobody said you had to reconstruct the solar system, you’re not a hero and you’re not a god and you’re certainly not the sun, but you made sure it ended before it had even begun,

you didn’t
have
to run

but it’s not too late
to come back
to stay.

I’ve never not had it. It’s strange talking about it because it’s just part of who I am. It’s a reflection of how I feel when I play music. But the thing is, if I was doing it as a dude, it would be normal. Since I’m a girl, it’s not the most seen thing, so maybe that’s why people notice it.

“Playing live is really the only time I get to let the fuck go. There are definitely times, as a girl, that I see pictures of myself and I’m like, ‘Oh, Este, maybe you want to reel it in a little bit. Maybe concentrate on not letting go so much.’ The problem with that is, when I concentrate on that, I’m not concentrating on having fun, and that’s totally reflected in my performance. It’s definitely not going anywhere, so if people don’t like it, they can shut the fuck up.